What’s Under your Anger?
I’ve worked with many clients over my professional career that struggle with intense feelings of anger. Anger that feels justified, anger that doesn’t. Anger about big things, small things, everything. When I ask them to describe how they feel, it’s “angry.”
Anger is an incredibly helpful emotion. Anger often acts as a protector, it comes up when we feel we’ve been wronged, hurt, or feel vulnerable or unsafe. Anger motivates us to take action, to right a wrong, and to protect ourselves and the ones we love. There is nothing inherently wrong with anger.
But by the time people get to meet with me, their anger has become something else that isn’t entirely helpful. Their anger might tint every interaction with their family, their friends, or their coworkers. It may cause them problems when they act out. It may just be starting to feel draining, instead of energizing, to be angry because they feel angry all the time.
Adding to the issue is the fact that many of us grew up in families or communities where anger was the only acceptable emotion to express. Others may have grown up in families where anger was never allowed to be expressed. Both are extreme, and both can lead us to developing an unhealthy relationship with our anger.
I often ask clients to think about anger as an umbrella emotion. Yes, sometimes anger is just anger. But other times anger is masking for other feelings- like sadness, fear, or frustration.
Take this example: My partner went out drinking with some friends and told me he was going to be home at midnight. When I woke up at 3:00am, he’s wasn’t home. Immediately, I got scared and worried that something awful had happened to him. I started to be fearful and insecure, telling myself all kinds of stories about what happened to make him not come home. By the time he got home, I was angry. Really angry.
But was I really angry? Maybe.
But maybe I was also scared, sad, and insecure. I was certainly feeling a lot of things, but all I showed was my anger.
Does that sound like something you’ve experienced? Many of us have had similar situations where we showed anger, when what we were really feeling was likely something else. Something that is typically harder for us to express than anger.
The next time you find yourself getting angry, pause and ask yourself- is my anger covering something? What is underneath this anger? When we can identify what is going on below the surface, we can act from a place of greater clarity and make decisions based on what is really happening, instead of out of anger.
#therapy #angermanagement #anger #counseling
